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Drupal(Vol)Con 2010

Computerminds were due to attend the latest DrupalCon over in San Francisco, however Eyjafjallajokull had other ideas. With planes grounded and Europe at a standstill (in the air) we couldn't make it.

However, an amazing bunch of people came together a couple of days before the start of Drupalcon proper to set up: DrupalVolCon London.

DrupalVolCon was really cool, we watched the drupalcon keynotes from SF on a projector, and ate lots of pizza. We also presented sessions to each other, unconference style, here are some of the highlights:

Email-Newsletter module - http://drupal.org/project/enewsletter - Robert Castelo showed us his suite of module for generating and sending email newsletters using Drupal. There were some really great features, and it can do quite a lot! Robert is looking to integrate with other Drupal modules as much as possible and get some of the reusable functionality back into the wider community (beyond email newsletters).

Drupal Performance - Stewart Robinson explained how to use Varnish (http://varnish-cache.org) to make your Drupal site zip along, he covered some basic mysql performance settings and showed how easy it is to change your site to use the high speed Drupal hack: Pressflow

Hacked! - http://drupal.org/project/hacked Our very own Steven Jones showed how to use the Hacked! module to explore whats changed in your code since you downloaded Drupal and any contributed modules, drush integration and a live demo that worked were all present here.

User Import - http://drupal.org/project/user_import - Not a session but just something that came out of chatting at the Drupal VolCon, the user import module allows you to import users from csv files, and do so in a really nice way. It's also works well if you need to create nodes for the users, such as for content_profile or similar. Very useful bit of kit indeed, we've already used it on a project!

A big thanks to the organisers of the London 2010 Drupal VolCon, they know who they are, but if you don't you might want to feel all warm and fuzzy about the logos on this page: http://uk.drupalvolcon.com/helpers

About the author

Steven has a wealth of experience building Drupal-based websites and tools associated with them. He is a maintainer of the Aegir project and has contributed to many other projects on Drupal.org. He is currently our infrastructure lead and is a lead architect on many of our projects.

He is a Master of Mathematics graduate from the University of Warwick and got involved in Drupal creating a website for the Maths society there.